Your income is not as much as you think it is.  Let me show you why  using the numbers from the US Census Bureau for Santa Clara county

Median household income (in 2013 dollars) is $91,702 .However, note that this is not the amount that comes into the bank.  The employer deducts the  federal tax from this. A rough estimate of the income tax would be 27% (standard deductions, no dependents). This leaves $66942.46 .

After the Federal government takes its cut, the state government levies the state tax on the income. For California this would be 8%. This leaves $61587.06 .

Now let us calculate how many hours someone needs to work to get $61587.06 into the bank. A workday is 8 hours. Mean travel time to work in(minutes), is 25 minutes. Let us assume that he/she gets 21 days of vacation. This means that including the commute hours, subtracting vacation hours and assuming 5 days a week, he/she work 2069.55 hours annually.

So, your hourly earning rate is 61587.06/2069.55 = $29.75. Read that again: the median hourly earning rate is $29.75 . If you do not account for the tax cut and the time you spend in commute, you will believe that your hourly earning rate is 46.65 . However, that is not what an employee earns.

Next, let us see how this converts to buying power. Suppose someone with median income wants to buy shoes with a sticker price $100. The sales tax in California is 8%. What this means is that he/she end up spending $108 on the shoes. To earn $108 , this person needs to work for 3.6 hours.

I have made a spreadsheet to make this calculation easier. . If you want to figure out your spending power, create a copy of the spreadsheet and fill in the cells with numbers that apply to you.

Some ballpark numbers (for California):

• if your annual income is $50,000 , you need to work 6.7 hours to spend $100
• if your annual income is $100,000, you need to work 3.3 hours to spend $100
Defined tags for this entry: ideas, My take on life, work

Dina points to "email is dead" in reference to teens by Danah Boyd

"Now, let's talk about youth. They have email accounts. They get homework assignments sent there. Xanga tells them that their friends have updated their pages. Attachments (a.k.a. digital Netflix/Amazon packages) get sent there. Companies try to spam them there (a.k.a. junk mail). Sifting through the crap, they might get a neat penpal letter or a friend might have sent them something to read but, by and large, there's not a lot of emotional investment over email.

That said, take away their AIM or MySpace or SMS or whatever their primary form of asynchronous messaging with their friends is and they will start twitching and moan about how you've ruined their life. And you have. Because you've taken away their access to their friends, their access to the thing that matters most to them. It's like me taking away your access to blogs and email and being forced to stay at the office just because you showed up late for work.

There is a difference that I see in the way IM and emails work. On an IM, you get messages from a set of accepted people - who talk about stuff that (mostly) matters to you. On the other hand, your email account is a dropbox for a bunch of uninteresting stuff - mostly spam. However, if you think about it, email has its advantage too - it can be archived, encrypted, signed, personalized, sent across networks (i.e. your gmail.com account can send an email to yahoo.com email id, but you cannot chat with your yahoo! messenger friends from gtalk.

Maybe something equivalent to your IM-buddy list can be done for emails too. You have an email account and that accepts emails only from a whitelisted set of email-ids. Whenever you get an email from a new id, you can either add him to the buddy list or you can report the message as a spam and block the email id. Next step would be to integrate the notifications of new messages into you own desktop and an online presence indicator.

Just some food for thought .